New York To Legalize MMA: Why It Took So Long, And What It Means Going Forward

Matt Connolly
, ContributorI cover the business of sports with an MMA focus.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

With the state assembly casting a 113 to 25 vote, the longstanding battle to legalize professional mixed martial arts in New York cleared its last major hurdle on Tuesday afternoon, lifting a near 20-year ban.

The remaining steps to make it official — Governor Andrew Cuomo signing the bill into law and the state athletic commission submitting the appropriate regulations — should go off without a hitch, making the vote a landmark moment for the sport and its leading promotions.

But much like the assembly meeting that droned on for hours — due in large part to unwitting rants from the sport’s detractors — MMA’s path to legality in the nation’s largest market took far too long.

Chris Weidman, Former UFC middleweight world champion, participates in a news conference in New York advocating for the legalization of professional MMA in New York state. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Of course, there was a time when MMA was far from acceptable throughout the country. With the sport’s inherent violence and the UFC’s initial no-rules branding, Senator John McCain’s campaign for making MMA illegal was adopted by 36 states in the 1990s.

“Thanks to the efforts of McCain and the public outcry over a sport that was still more spectacle than anything, almost every state banned MMA,” said Jim Genia, Managing Editor of CagedInsider.com and one of the premier authorities on MMA in New York. “The UFC was forced to hold events where there were no athletic commissions.”

The promotion slowly began cleaning up its image, though, enacting a set of unified rules and holding its first sanctioned event in 2000. Not long after a new ownership group made up of current UFC executives Frank Fertitta (majority owner), Lorenzo Fertitta (majority owner/CEO) and Dana White (minority owner/President) purchased the company in 2001, the promotion became certified in its current home state of Nevada. Through the 2000s, the ban in other major markets were dropped as the sport elevated to mainstream popularity.

Except for one. The UFC could not break through in New York, with the bill to legalize MMA stalling in each of the past seven years. White revealed the underlying reason for the city's blockade back in 2011: a standoff between the Fertitta brothers’ Station Casions and Vegas’ Culinary Workers Union, whose parent company Unite Here counts almost 100,000 members in the Big Apple.